Drupala Installation Profile 5.19 v1.0 – Social Networking & Social Bookmarking for Drupal
]]>The Drupala Installation Profile is built on the Drupal 5.x Drigg Installation for social bookmarking and the Advanced Profile Kit for social networking. The site architecture makes extensive use of Views, Panels, and multiple content types to build a portal organized around taxonomy terms that includes blogs, articles, social bookmarks, and user profiles. The Drigg base theme has been redesigned to position featured categories in the primary links section and Drigg categories in the sidebar. This allows for an easy customization of the site structure to support virtually any topic. FCKeditor is pre-installed and configured for WYSIWYG blog & article publishing. The Drupala theme is two columns, optimized for APK & Drigg, and cross-browser tested in FF, IE6, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

There are two live sites currently based around the Drupala installation profile:

The Drupala Installation Profile contains two new themes, “Drupala” and “SEO-Mix”, as well as more than 50 contributed third-party modules for the Drupal 5.x platform. The installation package includes a MySQL database map and full Drupal 5.x installation. The Drupala and SEO-Mix themes are only different in the color of the top buttons of the GUI & search interface. The Drupala Installation Profile can be used as a base for multi-site installations, and comes with upgrade documentation.

The benefit of the Drupala installation profile is the combination of social networking and social bookmarking with a solid theme that can be deployed from a database map to pre-populate the site structure & configuration. With the Drupala installation profile, you can reduce the development time needed to build an advanced social networking / social bookmarking site on Drupal 5.x from 5 to 6 weeks to less than 1 week.

+ immediately change the password to something secure and begin configuration of the site.

6. Set up cron for the domain as usual.

Note: there is a “dashboard” page in the admin menu that contains all the instructions for configuring the Drupala installation and customizing it to your content. Just click on “Configure Site” and follow the links & instructions.

Drupala Profile – Configuration Instructions:

1. Goto “Site Information” & change the site name & email:

2. Goto the Taxonomy section – change the main categories & featured section information for social bookmarks, articles, and blogs: /admin/content/taxonomy

Note: Offset the “Blog” and “Article” taxonomy by one term when updating the settings, as the first portal view is a list of all content types and not tied to any vocabulary.

9. …and also delete the panels template pages not needed for your installation:

10. When customizing the profile, it is also a good idea to rename the views and panel pages to something that reflects the updated content – but the taxonomy terms should update automatically.

Additional Comments:

Renaming the views from taxonomy specific tags like “articles_web_design” to “views_1″ simplifies the deployment of the profile & configuration.

If you clone a View that is already embedded in a Panel through a Views Panel, then you may lose the original settings in the panels block.

Updated the Tagadelic settings to display “blog tags” on blog pages, “article tags” on article pages, and “popular tags” (from the social bookmarks) on all other site pages.

Added a content type “slideshow” – for simple views slideshow that links to featured site articles, and more complex sorting of images into portal panels using taxonomy.

Added the Update Status module to the Drupala profile since this was missing from 5.x core: http://drupal.org/project/update_status. This is really an essential module – looking forward to totally automated module & version upgrades in the future.

Important: we do NOT recommend upgrading the version of Advanced Profile Kit used with the Drupala installation profile at this time (Included Version: Advanced Profile Kit 5.x-1.0-alpha5).

Upgraded FCKeditor to the latest version of the module & editor files – preserved the custom configuration for Drupala – Chrome browser scroll area bug solved by editing /sites/all/modules/fckeditor/fckeditor/editor/fckeditor.html

For panels portal page displays, you may want to use flash, fpss, views slideshow, animated gifs, or just standard jpg/png files for a top section display.

With the Drupala installation profile, you can reduce the development time needed to deploy an advanced social networking / social bookmarking site on Drupal 5.x from 5 to 6 weeks to less than 1 week.

You can use the configuration “dashboard” page for administration that includes links to the pages above that you need to customize to configure the site after installation. Following the step by step process, you can easily create a custom social network, social bookmarking site, and multi-user blog portal for your publishing niche.

Finishing Configuration & Publishing:

After you have finished configuring the site, delete the dashboard page & menu entry.

Acquia Launches Cloud-based Solr Search Indexing
]]>Acquia, the start-up company founded by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer & founder of Drupal, has announced that they are now providing paid search indexing for Drupal sites on a subscription basis aimed at enterprise sites. Similar to Mollom, Acquia’s anti-spam software for CMS platforms, Acquia Search will also work for those running other open source software like WordPress, Joomla, TYPO3, etc as well as sites with proprietary code. Acquia Search is based on the Lucene and Solr distributions of Apache, and essentially works by having Acquia index your site’s content on their computers and then send it with encryption on demand to supply user queries using an integrated Acquia Search module. According to the announcement, Acquia is using Solr server farms on Amazon EC2 to power this on cloud architecture.

Many people have complained about Drupal’s core search functionality over the years, but the server requirements behind Solr and Lucene require a Java extension that most people are not equipped to manage on their existing IT architecture, staff, or budget. So Acquia is offering these search functionalities as SaaS, or Software as a Service on a remote-hosted, pre-configured basis. If you want to do it yourself, see:http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

“Acquia Search is included for no additional cost in every Acquia Network subscription. Basic and Professional subscribers have one ‘search slice’ and Enterprise subscribers have five ‘search slices’. A slice includes the processing power to index your site, to do index updates, to store your index, and to process your site visitors’ search queries. Each slice includes 10MB of indexing space – enough for a site with between 1,000 and 2,000 nodes. Customers who exceed the level included with their subscription may purchase additional slices. A ten-slice extension package costs an additional $1,000/year, and will cover an additional 10,000 – 20,000 nodes in an index of 100MB. For my personal blog, which has about 900 nodes at the time of this writing, a Basic Acquia Network subscription ($349 USD/year) would give me all the benefits of Acquia Search, plus all the other Acquia Network services.”

Put in this perspective, most Drupal users likely won’t be switching to Acquia Search anytime soon. But, for the most part… they have little need to. For small sites or social networks, Drupal’s core search is going to be generally sufficient. Drupal will index your site automatically on cron runs, and keep this index of keywords and nodes in a table of your MySQL database. If you are working a lot with taxonomy and CCK fields, then Faceted Search is a recommended choice: http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search

I have used Faceted Search on a number of sites and it is excellent for building a custom search engine around your site’s own custom vocabularies, hierarchies, and site structures. Faceted Search is also important in a number of Semantic Web integrations working with RDF data and other micro-tags attached to data fields. Acquia Search is designed to work in this way as well as to facilitate the number crunching involved when high traffic sites with extremely large databases of content need to sift through search archives quickly to return results from user queries. Consider the example of Drupal.org in this context – Acquia Search is the solution to managing over 500,000 nodes and millions of search queries on an extremely active site.

“Reality is that for a certain class of websites — like intranets or e-commerce websites — search can be the most important feature of the entire site. Faceted search can really increase your conversions if you have an e-commerce website, or can really boost the productivity of your employees if you have a large intranet. For those organizations, Drupal’s built in search is simply not adequate. We invested in search because we believe that for many of these sites, enterprise-grade search is a requirement… The search module shipped with Drupal core has its purpose and target audience. It isn’t right for everyone, just as Acquia Search is not for everyone. Both are important, not just for the Drupal community at large, but also for many of Acquia’s own customers. Regardless, there is no question that we need to keep investing and improving Drupal’s built-in search.”

In summary, Acquia Search is mostly targeted at enterprise level Drupal users with extremely large databases and high traffic, and is a cloud based solution that should not only speed up the rate of return on results, it should also improve the quality of the material returned based on faceted keywords & vocabularies. For those using Acquia’s personal or small business subscription accounts, the new search should appear as an additional “free bonus” with your monthly package of services. For users, even on a small site, the efficiency of faceted search may make information more accessible for visitors.

]]>http://webdevnews.net/2009/07/acquia-launches-cloudbased-solr-search-indexing/feed/4Replacing FPSS with Views Slideshow in Drupal – Tutorialhttp://webdevnews.net/2009/07/replacing-fpss-views-slideshow-drupal-tutorial/
http://webdevnews.net/2009/07/replacing-fpss-views-slideshow-drupal-tutorial/#commentsFri, 03 Jul 2009 15:00:44 +0000http://webdevnews.net/?p=1043This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Replacing FPSS with Views Slideshow in Drupal – Tutorial
]]>I have been using FrontPage SlideShow from JoomlaWorks on a number of sites, and would recommend it as a good CSS/PHP route to building a featured slide section that links to promoted content, articles, blog posts, groups, etc. One problem is that it is not free, the cost is around $35 for a license to use it on 5 to 10 domains. A second problem is highlighted by the example of releasing an installation profile for Drupal. We can release all of the code under GPL for the project except for FPSS. So, I began working on a conversion of our FPSS slides into Views Slideshow views.

The easiest way is to create a new content type, for example “slide,” and disable comments, post information, front page promotion, etc. Decide which size you would like to standardize all the images at, and then create a simple div structure with the image only as content. You can create a “views slideshow” view, sort only the “slide” content type, save it as a block or create a panels views block and embed it on a panels page. Use block or panels permissions to control the display. This is fine if you are using only images or banners made in photoshop that combine text and images, but if you want the to be text editable, viewable by search engines, and style-able by CSS, you will need to build a more complex template for your “slide” content type.

2. Create a new slide – use a consistent template for this content type to build Views Slideshow displays
+ you can use html, css, php, etc. to create a custom template
+ we are looking to replace the FPSS template we are using now, and will give the template + css as a sample

Template:
+ paste in slide node create form – edit the links & paths to be consistent with your information

<div id="viewslide">
<div id="slideleft">
<div id="slidetop">
<h2><a href="/articles/second-life">Prototype of a Sustainable Virtual Reality</a></h2>
</div>
<div id="slidenote">
<p>Avatar: Elusyve Jewell</p>
</div>
<div id="slidedesc">
<p>Unlike any other site on the web, Second Life has transformed the internet into an immersive, 3-D virtual world, a collectively authored mindscape navigated by cyberpunk avatars. How long until the VR goggles appear and we log our first sessions on the holodeck? A look at the future evolution of Second Life. <a href="/articles/second-life">Read more</a>.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="slideright"><a href="/articles/second-life"><img width="520" height="206" src="/files/secondlife.jpg" alt="Second Life" /></a></div>
</div>

CSS – paste in style.css or equivalent
+ Note: in the Drupala theme this is in blocks.css

Note: this code is cross-browser tested in FF, IE7, IE6, Safari, Opera, & Chrome. It includes theme specific CSS fixes that may not be applicable to all theme code & CSS structures. It is configured to work with the Drupala & SEO-Mix themes for the Drupala installation profile.

3. To recreate the full effect of FPSS, you will need to open the images into an editor like photoshop and add a 20px background color: #CCCCCC (fade 64%) “tab” – use Arial font, change the alignment to vertical, and add a “read more…” text snippet along the bottom corner going up the side of the image.

5. Embed the Views Slideshow – goto panels – “views panes” and create a views block for the view just created (D5) – embed the block in any panels page or use admin/build/blocks to display in thee regions by path
+ You may want to “Set view URL to panel URL” additionally in the views pane settings

6. Goto “taxonomy” in admin and create a vocabulary for the “slide” content type if you want to create more views and sort the slideshows for particular pages.

Summary:

FPSS comes with 7 or 8 different templates at least and has quite a few features, very few of which are replicated here. We basically needed to change from the version of FPSS we were using to an open source alternative and Views Slideshow is a great module. Drupal designers who spend some time to create templates for Views Slideshow will find them extremely useful in serving multimedia content, or as a replacement for Flash in some situations. I also like and recommend FPSS and will probably continue to use it in some sites.

]]>http://webdevnews.net/2009/07/replacing-fpss-views-slideshow-drupal-tutorial/feed/9TypeHost Releases Three Open Source Themes for Drupal – Drigg 5.xhttp://webdevnews.net/2009/06/typehost-releases-open-source-themes-drupal-drigg-5x/
http://webdevnews.net/2009/06/typehost-releases-open-source-themes-drupal-drigg-5x/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2009 14:43:03 +0000http://webdevnews.net/?p=917This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

TypeHost Releases Three Open Source Themes for Drupal – Drigg 5.x
]]>TypeHost Web Development, a Drupal Solutions Provider and open source web design company, has released three free themes for Drupal 5.x installations using the Drigg module for social bookmarking sites. Drigg is an extensive set of modules that transforms a Drupal installation into a social bookmarking site similar to Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, etc. The following themes were developed specifically to integrate Drigg with Advanced Profile Kit and are free to download and use in your Drigg-based Drupal 5.x sites.

Drupala Theme for Drupal 5.x Drigg Install:
The main theme for our social bookmarking / blog portal / social networking installation profile. This theme is derived from the Drigg base theme, but changes the menu structure to allow for more flexibility in working with taxonomy & views when building portal sites. The Drupala theme is two columns, optimized for APK & Drigg, and cross-browser tested in FF, IE6, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Uses bright blue gradients to define blocks & site sections, relatively clean, quick loading & scalable. Open Source / GNU Public License.

SEO-Mix Theme for Drupal 5.x Drigg Install:
The Drupala and SEO-Mix themes are only different in the color of the top buttons in the GUI, and the SEO-Mix theme uses an “up only” voting button, while the Drupala theme uses a +/- system. Included with the download of the Drupala theme above & part of the Drupala profile. Open Source / GNU Public License.

Echodemic Theme for Drupal 5.x Drigg Install:
Nice dark blue and white theme with wide main menu for a social bookmarking & blog portal site based on Drigg which includes a set of custom voting icons. This theme is also optimized for an APK install and cross-browser tested. Uses the same WebDevNews tutorial for styling the user log-in block. Sponsored by Echodemic. Released under the Open Source / GNU Public License.

TypeHost Web Development is a Drupal Solutions Provider of web design, graphic art, custom theme & module programming, project management, site installation & administration, security upgrades, SEO, and other services relating to the deployment of the Drupal community web site architecture over shared, dedicated, and cloud hosting environments. We create unique websites for our clients based on their personal ideas & collective vision, business needs, database & software requirements, registered user community, and target audience. Our clients range from some of the largest companies in the world to NGOs, small businesses, galleries, photographers, and artists.

TypeHost Web Development is a web design company specializing in CMS sites that combine social networking, social bookmarking, blog, wiki, & article publication, forums, ecommerce, and other Web 2.0 features (private messaging, SEO, embedded video, image archives, WYSIWYG editing, user profiles, classifieds, etc.) all built on the Open Source development platform Drupal, contributed modules, and themes. LAMP, CSS, PHP, mySQL, DHTML/XHTML, JavaScript, AJAX, XML, RSS, Atom, RDF, & other Semantic Webmicroformats supported. TypeHost is now listed on oDesk, Elance, GetAFreelancer, Scriptlance, and other freelance web development sites as a service provider.

Our current work involves continued development on the Drupal 5.x platform, particularly for social networking & social bookmarking sites, using Drupal 6.x and Acquia Drupal along with Ubercart for ecommerce, blog publishing, news and information sites. We are developing new themes and installation profiles for Drupal that include database exports of a typical site category structure, taxonomy portal content, pre-programmed Panels, Views, and module configurations for deploying and designing complex sites more quickly. Coming Soon: online demos, file downloads and feedback section, hosted web design solutions, full CMS web design packages, & site customization options.

]]>http://webdevnews.net/2009/06/typehost-releases-open-source-themes-drupal-drigg-5x/feed/9Citigate Cunningham Nominated for 2008 Gold SABRE Award for Acquia Public Relationshttp://webdevnews.net/2009/05/citigate-cunningham-nominated-2008-gold-sabre-award-acquia-public-relations/
http://webdevnews.net/2009/05/citigate-cunningham-nominated-2008-gold-sabre-award-acquia-public-relations/#commentsWed, 13 May 2009 15:00:03 +0000http://webdevnews.net/?p=867This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Citigate Cunningham Nominated for 2008 Gold SABRE Award for Acquia Public Relations
]]>The public relations planning behind the launch of the new Acquia website has landed Citigate Cunningham, the firm who orchestrated the campaign, more than 100 media placements, 11 speaking engagements and two awards for Acquia since the project began in January 2008, according to a press release this week published on the web. The Holmes Group has also nominated Citigate Cunningham’s Acquia marketing and promotional campaign for a SABRE Award this year as one of the best new products in the “Business to Business” category on the web.

The article reports that the development team behind Acquia, which includes Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, had concerns about how the open source community would view a commercial Drupal development company and enterprise release of the CMS, and the PR campaign was designed to smooth this over.

“Drupal, a social publishing system with a vibrant, passionate open source community of more than 350,000 members, is the platform for many well-known company and educational institution websites. Acquia was launched with the mission to increase enterprise adoption of Drupal by providing enterprise-level functionality and support to the open source technology.”

“Citigate Cunningham recognized that a successful launch would require the delicate balance of generating substantial buzz around the company and its offerings, while remaining sensitive to the Drupal and open source community’s concerns about how a commercial company would impact the Drupal open source project. The agency leveraged Acquia Co-Founder and CTO Dries Buytaert, the original Drupal creator, as an evangelist, community advocate, and open source celebrity, and designed a three-stage strategic PR approach that would build trust within the Drupal community, drive demand for Acquia in a beta launch, and finally bridge the gap perceived by the enterprise community as part of the general availability launch.”

“To accomplish its goal, the team targeted both social and traditional media outlets including business press, technology trades, Web 2.0 blogs, and influential analysts frequently quoted in the press. Additionally, the agency raised Buytaert’s profile by securing high profile coverage, awards, and speaking engagements that served to seed confidence within the open source ecosystem.”

Citigate Cunningham’s other clients include eTrade, Sprint, Cisco, HCL, OPSource, AliBaba, and other Silicon Valley & international IT firms. According to their site, “In enterprise technology, we have represented some of the biggest software and hardware brands in business applications, security, mobility, telecommunications, semiconductors, systems, IT services and high performance computing. We have also represented some of the coolest consumer tech companies in digital marketing, digital media and entertainment, consumer electronics, social media and eCommerce. Market segments we’ve penetrated include financial services, healthcare, government, education/academia, energy and manufacturing.”

“We’re very proud to have been recognized as a finalist for the SABRE Awards,” said Gary Thompson, chairman of Citigate Cunningham. “Because Acquia offers commercial support for the well-known Drupal open source project, we had a built-in audience for our launch. Our biggest challenge was to reach beyond the Drupal community and expand the reach of the Acquia story into the enterprise market.”

All in all, this can be seen as a pragmatic move by Acquia, contracting an industry leading PR firm to manage the launch of their brand internationally. Many people outside of the PR industry will undoubtedly feel a bit cynical when reading the inside language of public relations strategy, and few really investigate the way these PR firms hype the companies and products that they promote into news stories,”buzz”, and spin that most people take as legitimate news but may be little different in content than a paid corporate “info-mercial”.

Nevertheless, it is easy to see the risk involved in not getting it right at the time of start up (“cuil”), and the fact that everything has gone so well for Acquia since their launch has definitely earned Citigate Cunningham a lot of support & respect. The fact that Acquia has a great product and team to promote has undoubtedly made the process much easier.

Acquia and the Drupal development team have shown great attention to the small details across all aspects of the project that are a symbol of professionalism in open source, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch of Acquia is another example of that. But for most users, “a strategic PR campaign to build trust” and “seed confidence” is only going to work when the PR campaign itself disappears into the background noise.

]]>http://webdevnews.net/2009/05/citigate-cunningham-nominated-2008-gold-sabre-award-acquia-public-relations/feed/0Automattic releases BuddyPress – Official “Sister Project” to WordPresshttp://webdevnews.net/2009/05/automattic-releases-buddypress-official-sister-project-wordpress/
http://webdevnews.net/2009/05/automattic-releases-buddypress-official-sister-project-wordpress/#commentsMon, 04 May 2009 14:37:07 +0000http://webdevnews.net/?p=831This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Automattic releases BuddyPress – Official “Sister Project” to WordPress
]]>Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic, announced the release of BuddyPress last week on the official WordPress site. The BuddyPress site is live, with free downloads and installation instructions for BuddyPress 1.0 – which expands a typical WordPress blog installation into a full social network with most of the features of mySpace, Facebook, Ning, and other popular sites. My first reaction on this is… amazing, massive, incredible, exactly what was needed, soon to be huge, and really nice design over all. Congratulations to all involved in the development and publication of this release, it looks like a very important move in the future evolution of the WordPress platform and something that will encourage many social network developers to build with the CMS.

“What if there was software with the elegance and extensibility of WordPress but all the features you’ve come to expect from social networks like Facebook? Now there is: check out BuddyPress. BuddyPress is an official sister project of WordPress. The idea behind it was to see what would happen to the web if it was as easy for anyone to create a social network as it is to create a blog today. There’s been an explosion of social activity on the web, it’s probably the most important trend of the past few years, but there’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.”

BuddyPress includes user profiles, private messaging, friends / buddylists, groups, activity streams, a wall / stream like section called “the wire” for status updates and tweet-like on-site micro-blogging, in addition to multi-user blogs and forums. I use this same profile quite a lot in building social networks with Drupal using Panels, Advanced Profile Kit, Buddylist, Private Message, Flag, Activity Stream, Views, CCK, Content Profile / Bio, Organic Groups, and other modules. Because of the multiple development teams managing the combination of modules needed to build the working equivalent of this in Drupal, and the 5.x / 6.x / 7.x development cycle variations + all the time assembling, theming, and debugging a social network install in Drupal… the out of the box offering from BuddyPress will be a strong challenge.

Working daily with both WordPress and Drupal both for web publishing and building social networks for clients, I have long felt WordPress had many advantages for single user blogs (really nice themes, for example) vs. Drupal, but lacked the module expandability to allow the construction of social networks. BuddyPress completely changes that and offers out of the box what is very challenging to build in Drupal. It could save 2 to 3 weeks development time on a complex social network site, and allowing the designer to focus work on the theme and content rather than building the module architecture.

My hope is that Acquia (or another company or developer) will release a “social network” installation profile for Drupal that is similar to this. Despite the large number of social networks built with Drupal, I don’t think there has been anything close to an “official” social networking profile like BuddyPress. One reason for this – and it may be related to the release of BuddyPress as a “sister project” rather than just a collection of modules that plugin to WordPress, is to create a complex social network site that deploys on an installation profile you need to install in a way that the database is pre-populated with all the correct settings, permissions, and everything is automatically positioned in the site by block, section, menu, etc. To do this in Drupal, you basically have to include a mySQL database map with the installation profile – something that I also haven’t seen often, but we are working on at TypeHost. Then you have to have a GUI layer that makes it easy for the user to transform the archetypal site structure into a personal site. From the way it looks, Automattic has done this perfectly with BuddyPress.

In terms of branding, the name is not the absolute best choice here in my opinion, but there must have been a clear reasoning behind not just releasing it as another version of WordPress, like “WordPress – SN (Social Network)” vs. “WordPress (Blog or Standard version).” Also it is interesting that the projects seem to be on independent / co-dependent / inter-related development paths, but that BuddyPress is not being considered “the next” version of WordPress. Again, similar to Drupal, there is some decision making that sees these not as “core” modules – despite the fact that many people see them as core to the functionality of the CMS. WordPress functioning as a full social network may not be needed by the majority of single user blog publishers who use the CMS as a platform, but this release is going to make a big difference on the web. It will be interesting to chart the usership statistics of BuddyPress vs. WordPress over the next year to see how many sites adopt the new changes.

Summary: combined with WordPress themes and publishing ease, the addition of full social network functionality to the platform with the release of BuddyPress 1.0 is a slam dunk / home run for Automattic, bloggers, traditional WordPress users, and social network developers. Look to see this on even more websites than WordPress in the future, and to pull a lot of development away from Drupal, which still lacks a unified offering that builds a social network as simply and easily as BuddyPress.

]]>http://webdevnews.net/2009/05/automattic-releases-buddypress-official-sister-project-wordpress/feed/4Best New Drupal 6 Theme Releases of 2009http://webdevnews.net/2009/04/drupal-6-theme-releases-2009/
http://webdevnews.net/2009/04/drupal-6-theme-releases-2009/#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2009 15:00:27 +0000http://webdevnews.net/?p=673This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Best New Drupal 6 Theme Releases of 2009
]]>The latest version of Drupal (6.x) has many improvements with regard to theme creation vs. the 5.x platform and the artists who create the themes continue to release some great, new designs. In this article, we review some of the best free, open source themes released on the drupal.org site in the Spring of 2009. Top Notch Themes have released another Acquia supported theme – “Slate” which has a professional, corporate look that trends away from the traditional blues of Drupal. The graphic art and design blog “Smashing Magazine” has made a strong entry into the field with three new themes from their studio that are included in the list. Other themes include a remix of the Acquia Marina theme by a Russian Group, released under the code-name of “Waffles,” and a couple ports of popular WordPress themes to Drupal.

“Acquia Slate is an advanced, dark, corporate Drupal theme developed by TopNotchThemes in partnership with Acquia for their commercially-supported Drupal distribution.”

Highlights: 14 regions (excellent), similar to a #111 – #222 – #333 CSS color slide with gradients, two types of gold tones on the links, nice front space for splash image on home page with slogan and transparent menu overlay, and in the works possibly some kind of banner rotation for the image block (maybe similar to the Marinelli theme).

“Clean modern theme with fine tuned css, will be great for blogs, communities and online media.
This theme was designed & developed exclusively for Drupal by RussianWebStudio.com team.”

Highlights: smart colors and styling, nice borders and accents, CSS has been configured with font & display settings that recall sites like Business Week and Bloomberg. The blocks at the top of content are 50% width followed by a full page banner, repeated at the bottom, with 2 columns, header, & footer.

“The Magazeen theme is a cool and modern theme with a stylish colour scheme. This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.”

Highlights: likely the best of the three themes from Smashing Magazine, actually very reminiscent of their site’s design itself. Provides an excellent base for further customization.

“This is a valid XHTML 1.0 Strict / CSS 2.1 theme ported from the free CSS template Inf08. The original template is licensed under CCPL but the designer has kindly granted me the permission to release the theme under GPL “

Highlights: very nice & neat “notebook” type of theme with tabbed browsing and clear lines. More of the strong WordPress crossover to Drupal themes.

“This is the theme used by the Chicago Drupal Meetup Group. It has been ported to Drupal 6 with zen. It uses a header based on the current time.”

Highlights: can create sunrise / sunset, day / night graphics for the main banner and synch with users local time anywhere in the world. Top “toolbar” type of menu can save a lot of space & is efficient. Prominent user avatar support.

“Color Paper was initially created by the DreamTemplate team for WordPress. This theme aims to combine visual appeal with clean typography and vivid design elements. It was created by them especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Which was later converted to a Drupal theme by Leow Kah Thong.”

Highlights: Technically this is a 2008 theme, but it is included in the list because it is exceptional. Endless possibilities for theme garden type of mods to this template.

The Author of the original WordPress theme writes – “Fervens is a 3 column theme that has a base idea of ‘freshness’. Summer is my favorite time of year as it always amazes us with a rainbow of sensation and colors, making this time of year the best of all. The green of the plants and trees, the blue of the water….I love this time of year :)… “

“The theme was designed by Design Disease and brought to you by Smashing Magazine. Coded into a Drupal theme by Leow Kah Thong.”

Open Source Micro-Blogging CMS Software & Twitter Integrations
]]>With all of the news about a possible Twitter sale to Google, I am wondering if we will see an increased trend in clients looking for micro-blogging sites and “Twitter Clones” for local and niche communication. Already, I am offering Twitter and Social Network integration (Facebook, mySpace) to clients on blog and ecommerce sites, to easily connect with friends, community, marketing, communication, etc. that takes place on those sites from the main domain. More and more people are including their Facebook status messages and Twitter stream on their homepages, using the API & RSS feeds those sites offer to pull social content across network channels.

WordPress Plugins:

Xavisys, the web development company behind WebDevNews.net, has created a Twitter feed module for WordPress called WordPress Twitter Widget Pro.

This module will republish all of your “tweets” into your Drupal site, as well as building a stream from your Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and other social networking and bookmarking sites. Highly recommended.

Also very promising for Drupal, but still in development, is the Facebook Status module (Facebook-style Statuses).

As expected, this module replicates the Facebook “Wall” and allows users to post status messages on their user profile pages. When I tried the module previously, there were still some bugs that would have prevented its use on a live site, but huge potential here with this module and a 2.0 version is now released.

The Twitter module allows users to:

Associate one of more Twitter accounts with their Drupal user account

Have their tweets displayed in a sidebar block or on their user profile

Post to their own Twitter account or a site-wide Twitter account whenever they create new content

The Tapatio Projects seeks to build an installation profile for Drupal that “enable(s) users to leverage a drupal system as a front end to twitter.com (and other sources in the future) allowing them to use drupal as a hub for message aggregation, moderation, and dispatching.”

If you are interested in breaking out from a CMS like Drupal or WordPress and building a site that is a stand alone micro-blogging platform like Twitter, the Laconica open source software may be of interest.

The alternative to Laconica (but operating on the same open source micro-blogging standard) is Open Microblogger

By design, the open-source micro-blogging sites share an API to allow easy cross posting and searching of messages between sites. They also have more advanced built in SMS capabilities, something you will have to add extra modules for in Drupal & WordPress.

Whether your client is requesting Twitter integration into their home page or business site, or you have a request to build a full micro-blogging platform, one of these solutions should make a good base to build upon.

]]>http://webdevnews.net/2009/04/open-source-micro-blogging-cms-software-twitter-integrations/feed/2Mullenweg: Scale WordPress to 20,000,000 Views per Day for $100 p/monthhttp://webdevnews.net/2008/12/mullenweg-scale-wordpress-to-20000000-views-per-day-for-100-pmonth/
http://webdevnews.net/2008/12/mullenweg-scale-wordpress-to-20000000-views-per-day-for-100-pmonth/#commentsMon, 08 Dec 2008 10:00:57 +0000http://webdevnews.net/?p=328This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Mullenweg: Scale WordPress to 20,000,000 Views per Day for $100 p/month
]]>An interesting article appeared on the front page of the drupal.org website, detailing the migration of the popular “crooks and liars” blog from WordPress to Drupal. According to the developers, when the site was averaging around the “200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for WordPress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for WordPress to handle the replication.” After experiencing a high degree of server downtime from the massive number of comments on the site, “crooks and liars” began to consider porting the site to Drupal for performance issues.

According to the site development team, benchmark tests showed that a Drupal 5.x installation was able to serve more than 8 times the number of pages per second vs. a standard WordPress 2.3 set up:

“I setup default installations of WordPress 2.3 and Drupal 5. I only enabled the core caching mechanisms in both setups and populated them with the exact same data and display options. Both systems also used the default themes and features. After running a series of tests through JMeter, I quickly confirmed my beliefs and even exceeded them as I saw Drupal was able to handle about eight times the requests per second as WordPress, both on the front page and the same single post view with 157 comments.”

An interesting overview of the migration, and custom modules used in the development of the “crooks and liars” site can be found online here:

What is more interesting, is after the post was published, WordPress / Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg weighed in personally on the issue, by commenting on the post and listing ways to configure WordPress to scale to 20 million hits per day – at a cost of only $100 per month. He writes:

“Always sorry to see someone leave WordPress, but you ended up pretty much the other best place I could think of. Features are a great reason to switch, but scaling doesn’t need to be. We host some of the largest poltical blogs like all of CNN’s which regularly get thousands of comments per day and we do about a billion pageviews a month on WordPress.com, so here are some tips for future people who may come across this post (some which may be useful to the Drupal community as well):

1. Every release of WP gets faster, so upgrading can get you sometimes significant boosts depending on your bottleneck.
2. Use the memcached object cache backend.
3. If memcached is set up, use Batcache instead of wp-cache.
4. If you get a lot of comments, consider using InnoDB as your storage engine instead of MyISAM inside of MySQL.
5. Double-check that your webserver is set up properly for static requests, this is the cause of 90%+ of the problems we see.

With the above and a single $100/month server from LT you can get around 20,000,000 pageviews a day. With shared Batcache and HyperDB (which you already used, nice) it’s a lot easier to scale out both the web and database tier independently as needed. We haven’t found the upper limit of this strategy yet.”

“Development testing showed a 40x reduction in page generation times: pages generated in 200ms were served from the cache in 5ms. Traffic simulations with Siege demonstrate that WordPress can handle up to twenty times more traffic with Batcache installed.”

Based on Quantcast statistics, Drupal.org ranks 13,298 overall while WordPress.org ranks #11. Global tracking statistics are not available for drupal.org on the site.

Styling the Drupal User Login Block – PHP Code & CSS
]]>This tutorial goes through the steps of one way to create a custom user login block for Drupal. Best is to disable the original login block in the admin/build/block section, start with a new block with custom code, and then style the details with CSS. The requirements for this project are a rounded corner, blue background block with two custom tabs at the top.

I modified the code to add some css IDs, classes, span tags, and also the text/links for the top tabs.

3. Select PHP code for the input and save the block.

4. From the main blocks page, click on “configure” for the block you just created. I selected to show this block only for “anonymous user” because I did not need the simplified display after the user has been logged in. The code generates a block that can also be customized to show the site status for authenticated users, but usually the navigation menu does this sufficiently. Enable the block and position it where you like in the display.

5. The rest is basically CSS – setting the image as the background for the login area and the tabs, positioning the text elements and fields. This example is based on a 250px wide column with a two column layout. It includes bold text on the display and overrides the default styling of the Drupal user login form elements.

There is a vertical-alignment fix to standardize the display in IE, and a 1px addition to the lower input field so that the form will align evenly on both ends. Add the following CSS to your theme in style.css, blocks.css, or wherever fits best.